I move further into the room, each step taking me closer and close to her bedside.
"Of course I came." I say, my voice a little shaky. I don't know why I'm so nervous right now. It's my sister, yet, it feels like I'm talking to a stranger.
So much time has separated us now, that's exactly what she is. She doesn't know anything about me or her life and neither do I.
"It's good to see you." Her voice is raspy and dry.
I inch closer and sit down in the chair pushed up beside her bed.
She turns over, my hands instinctively reaching for her as she does so. She looks so fragile, a bag of bones rolling over in the bed to lay on her side facing me.
Her eyes have dark circles pressed in below them and her lips are cracked and thin.
It's striking how different she looks from me. Even though we are twins, we have never favored. Where I got our mom's green eyes and dark hair, she got our dad's blonde hair and blue eyes. Our parents used to joke about how they had each made a mini version of themselves.
But now the differences are so much more evident. So stark. She's pale and thin and sickly, while I'm athletic and tan from days spent laying out with Gabby and Ella by the pool.
"Where the hell have you been?" I finally ask, leaning back in my chair as I watch her eyes move slowly over me.
"Lots of places." She whispers back, coughing a little.
I stare at her.
That's all she has to say? Just that she's been lots of places? Of course I already know that.
"How could you leave your baby?" I ask her, feeling the large wedge between us even as I sit a couple of feet away.
She blinks slowly. I think she's going to go back to sleep but she sighs, letting her eyes close.
"It was for the best, Hayden." She tells me. "I couldn't be what she needed."
"So you just ditched her at a Wendy's?" I balk at her. "You could have brought her to a hospital, or sought out adoption, or...or called me."
"I didn't want to burden your life." She says around a yawn. Like she is casually talking about the weather and not the abandonment of her own child.
"That doesn't matter, Alice." I shoot back. "She's just a baby. She needed-."
"She needed to not be with me." She cuts me off. "I'm not any good for her and I know that. She deserved a chance."
"But you-."
"I didn't even know I was pregnant." She cuts me off again. "I didn't even know, Hayden. I thought I'd ate something bad. I gave birth in an alley. I was so confused and I didn't know what else to do with her. I figured if I came here with her I'd get arrested and I didn't want to do more time, so I just left her with the first person I saw."
Do more time? So she had been in jail at least once before.
I can't make her words paint a picture in my head. How could she not know she was pregnant? How could she go into labor and have a whole ass baby and not know what was happening?
Drugs.
They said she was on a ton of them.
Part of me wants to believe her. To believe she didn't know she was pregnant while she was getting high. I'd like to think she's a better person than that, but I don't know her at all.
"I left her there and just tried to leave." She goes on. "I tried to get out of town, but I guess I started hemorrhaging? I passed out and woke up here. I gave them your name but I didn't have your number."
